Boom

Here comes old Armageddon again. During the past several years the apocalypse has been turning up with such regularity on movie screens and the pages of best sellers that it’s starting to feel like a bad (and melted and mutilated) penny. But that doesn’t mean you should count out an engaging little play about the end of the world that opened Thursday night at Ars Nova.

That’s right. I said little. For though the play is called “Boom,” Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s doomsday comedy has almost none of the loud noises and special effects associated with films like “I Am Legend” and “Cloverfield.”

“Boom” takes place in a single room, has three characters and often sounds like the sort of show more appropriately underscored by a gentle laugh track than by crashing chords. Don’t be fooled, though, into thinking that this story of the only man and woman left on earth, who meet cute and stay agitatedly mismatched, is only apocalypse lite.

At first glance “Boom” suggests a “Twilight Zone” episode rewritten as a sitcom. And it is not without a certain glib whimsy that a marriage of such genres might produce. But it winds up speaking, quietly and piquantly, to our enduring fascination with and need for myths about the beginning of life as well as its end.

The less-than-romantic couple at the center of “Boom,” directed by Alex Timbers, are Jules (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe), a marine biologist, and Jo (Megan Ferguson), a journalism student. She shows up one night in Jules’s small underground laboratory on a university campus, having answered an online ad for a hookup that promises “sex to change the course of the world.”

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Megan Ferguson and Lucas Near-Verbrugghe in Boom.Credit
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Jules was speaking literally, it turns out, as is his wont. During his research on a deserted tropical island, he discovered patterns among the behavior of fish that seemed to portend a premature end to most forms of earthly life. So he has turned his tiny lab-cum-apartment into a place to wait out the disaster and begin remaking humanity.

His being gay poses a bit of a problem, of course. So does Jo’s attitude toward babies: She hates the very idea of them. Will love flourish anyway? Will life as we know it survive?

The answer to these questions is yes — sort of. In the course of Jules and Jo’s adversarial thrust and parry, “Boom” slyly derails expectations. For starters, the production makes it clear that we’re seeing only a conjectural version of what may or may not have really happened.

Which brings me to the play’s third character, Barbara (Susan Wands), a starchy, name-tag-wearing woman in a crisp black uniform. Barbara is our guide for what appears to be a sort of theme-park installation portraying the end of civilization thousands of years earlier. She animates Jules and Jo by pulling levers and plays percussive accompaniment to the story’s more dramatic moments, in a booth to the left of the 21st-century set. (Wilson Chin is the designer.)

Neither the script nor the production quite fulfills the potential of this notion of an artificially reconstituted past or of the future’s idea of our present existence. Though the cast is ingratiating, more adventurously stylized performances might have been welcome (and expected from Mr. Timbers, the artistic director of the experimental Freres Corbusier company).

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Susan Wands in "Boom."Credit
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

But Mr. Nachtrieb, a San Francisco writer in his early 30s whose résumé includes degrees in theater and biology, has a gift for darkly funny dialogue and an appealing way of approaching big themes sideways. He gives Jo and Jules back stories and quirks that drolly embody the resigned, jokey fatalism common to youth, and particularly to youth in our time.

Jules has seen every member of his immediate family disappear via an exotic assortment of calamities. (His mother, he recalls sadly, “couldn’t have picked a worse time to go on a tour of un-reinforced masonry in California.”) Jo, who has a tendency to fall unconscious when danger threatens, has been working on a class journalism project that presents “random sex as the last glimmer of hope in a decaying society.”

As for Barbara, whose annotative gestures are not quite human, she is not the cold fish she first appears to be. Every so often she interrupts the story of Jules and Jo to defend what is, after all, only a speculation on how the world once ended and began again. She also narrates an extravagant account of her own conception.

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That bit of autobiography also sounds pretty suspect. But as Barbara makes clear, such tales are, in their way, as essential to human survival as upwardly striving evolution. “I am passionate about my stories,” she says angrily. “Passionate.” That Mr. Nachtrieb is, too, is what gives “Boom” its buoyancy.